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Linda Scott

Emeritus DP World Chair for Entrepreneurship and Innovation

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Professor Linda Scott is the Emeritus DP World Chair for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Linda is best known for her creation of the concept of the Double X Economy – a perspective that describes the global economy of women in both the developed and developing world, and the roles of women not only as consumers, but as investors, donors and workers. She writes a blog called The Double X Economy, as well as blogging for the World Economic Forum, Forbes, and Bloomberg Businessweek on gender issues.

Professor Scott has been selected as one of the Top 25 Global Thinkers by Prospect magazine in both 2014 and 2015. The Double X Economy concept was featured by a special Financial Times video series called, “Thinking Big” in January 2014. Linda was also a finalist for the Thinkers 50 “Breakthrough Thinker” award for this same work in 2012. Many other world press vehicles, from The Economist to BBC, have covered Linda's research.

Linda is founder of Power Shift, the Oxford Forum for Women in the World Economy. This select forum brings together 200 leaders from across sectors to think and build partnerships around empowering women economically. She curates the programme each year. In 2015, the theme was Women and Markets. In 2014, the theme was Women and Finance and in 2013, the theme was Women and Entrepreneurship.

Linda is invited to speak at many different venues and to many groups. In 2014 and 2015, she spoke at the World Bank and the United Nations. She was a keynote speaker at the global conference of the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts in July 2014.

Linda and her colleagues at Oxford are engaged in a range of projects including:

Selecting and testing a set of psychometrics to assess and monitor “women’s economic empowerment,” under an academic grant from the ExxonMobil Foundation.

Designing a measurement system for the Walmart Empowering Women Together system, which works to give small women-owned businesses around the world access to their giant consumer market.

Bringing together a consortium of multinationals to share learning and data about their women’s economic empowerment projects.

Examining how providing sanitary pads to poor girls in Africa helps them remain in school, increasing their life chances and positively impacting the society, economy and environment in these poor nations.

Looking at how distribution systems like Avon and CARE’s Rural sales Program in Bangladeshhelp thousands of impoverished women achieve financial security through the delivery of important goods, such as clothes and soap, to rural communities.

Linda and her colleagues have developed a series of cases exploring the limitations that gender sets on women’s engagement in the world economy, including their access to capital and their participation in world markets. All the cases can be downloaded for free.

In addition to her extensive work around women’s entrepreneurship, Linda is a leader in advertising research, particularly as it relates to consumer response to imagery and music. For her work in this area, she was recently nominated for the Paul Converse Award for long-term contribution to marketing scholarship. Linda remains active in the arena of advertising research, as Editor of Advertising and Society Review, a board member of the Advertising Educational Foundation and board member of the Consumer Culture Theory organisation. She published a path-breaking article on consumer response to imagery in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2007 and has further work on this topic in review.

Prior to joining Saïd Business School in 2006, Linda held appointments in advertising, art, women's studies and communications at the University of Illinois. Her education includes bachelors and master's degrees in American literature and history, an MBA and a doctorate in mass communications.

Linda’s Twitter is @ProfLindaScott. She is currently writing two books, The Price of Sexism with Carla Power, and The Double X Economy.

Research

Linda’s current research focuses on the potential for market-based approaches to provide economic empowerment and entrepreneurial opportunities for poor women in developing nations. She also conducts research related to consumer responses to imagery and music in advertising and the relationship between religion and commerce.

The Double X Economy

Through her concept of the Double X Economy, Linda emphasises the ways in which the economic behaviours of women in the rich nations are increasingly channelled to benefit their less fortunate sisters in the world’s most deprived areas.

Linda explains: “While women have always engaged in economic behaviour, their activities and outcomes have usually gone unnoticed, unmeasured and unregulated. In particular, the fact that women in many cultures, past and present, have been precluded from participating in paid labour has meant their productive contributions have dropped beneath the radar. The further tendency to focus on production without recognising the role consumption plays has tended to obscure the power and reach of the women’s economy.”

Linda’s Double X Economy research was recognised by Thinkers 50, which shortlisted her for its annual Breakthrough Thinker award.

Avon in Africa

Linda and her colleague, Catherine Dolan, conducted the first independent, empirical investigation of the Avon system’s ability to empower poor, black women of South Africa and lift them from poverty by selling Avon cosmetics. This three-year study was funded by the Economics and Social Science Research Council and the Department for International Development.

CARE Bangladesh

Linda and her colleagues, Catherine Dolan and Mary Johnstone-Louis, spent three years researching an innovative, nationwide system that helps poor women living in rural communities in Bangladesh become entrepreneurs. The CARE Rural Sales Programme has trained and employed thousands of women in rural areas of Bangladesh, helping to lift them from poverty through participation in a vast distribution system that carries basic consumer products, medicines, food, apparel and agricultural items to remote villages at reasonable prices. Having studied the system from the perspective of the entrepreneurs since 2008, Linda is now seeking funding for research that will investigate the impact the consumer goods have had on the 80 districts in which the system is working.

Pampers / UNICEF

Linda has researched the Pampers / UNICEF promotion that funds the purchase of vaccines to combat a common, but little known killer, maternal neonatal tetanus (MNT). Pampers and UNICEF joined forces in 2004 to work toward the elimination of MNT, an infection that kills mothers and babies in poor, remote areas when birth occurs in unclean environments. Through a promotion in which Procter & Gamble, the makers of Pampers, donated one vaccine for every pack of diapers purchased, enough money has now been raised to buy a vaccine for every woman who needs it worldwide.

Sanitary care in Ghana and Uganda

Linda’s research into the potential for free sanitary pads to help teen girls in developing nations attend school has received a great deal of attention. In a study conducted in Ghana, Linda and her team demonstrated that this simple product, one the Western world takes for granted, can have a life-changing impact on young women.

Images and music in advertising

For more than two decades Linda has studied consumer responses to images and music in advertising. She has authored numerous academic articles and a book on the subject and was nominated for the Paul Converse Award for long-term contribution to marketing scholarship for her work.

Linda’s current research in this area demonstrates that consumers read pictures as if they are a form of writing, inferring specific and detailed messages from the styles in which objects are represented.

Religion and Commerce

Linda is currently studying ‘new age’ religion and the marketplace in Glastonbury, England with a particular interest in the interface between more feminine visions of the sacred and commercial activity in the town. Linda’s latest book – Consumption and Spirituality – examines the consumption of spiritual products, services, experiences, and places through a collection of articles by leading and emerging scholars.

In addition, Linda has conducted research on the Halal industry for the Malaysian government. This work was undertaken in collaboration with universities in Malaysia to evaluate various industries as potential growth areas for Malaysian SMEs under a broad ‘halal’ definition.

In the course of her research, Linda has engaged with thousands of women and girls, as well as government officials, corporate managers, educators, shopkeepers and public health nurses, to help improve the living conditions for women in developing countries. She has worked with Procter & Gamble, Avon, CARE International, UNICEF and many local NGOs and companies on the implementation of programmes that assist women and children in some of the world’s poorest regions. Through this extensive work, Linda has established herself as a leading expert on women’s entrepreneurship and empowerment in emerging markets.

Linda was recently appointed to the U.S. Department of State’s International Council on Women’s Business Leadership (ICWBL) Subcommittee on Access to Markets. As a member of this Subcommittee, she will support the development of projects and policies that will empower women with the tools and resources necessary to thrive in an increasingly competitive global economy.

She is on the board of the Advertising Educational Foundation in New York and is the editor of Advertising & Society Review. She is also on the advisory boards for G23, Omnicom Group’s women’s consultancy, the Organization for Women in International Trade, the Internationalist’s Awards for Innovation in Media and the Saïd Foundation’s Inspiring Women in Leadership & Learning (iwill) initiative.

Linda is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, universities and events. She has recently discussed her work at the 2011 Interbrand Conference on the ‘New Age of Corporate Citizenship’ at Harvard University, a Procter & Gamble dinner for the Clinton Global Initiative, the American Marketing Association Summer Educators’ Conference and the Global Forum on Women’s Entrepreneurship at Zhejiang University, among others.

Linda’s Double X Economy research was recognised by Thinkers 50, which shortlisted her for its annual Breakthrough Thinker award. In addition, Linda was nominated for the Paul D. Converse Award for long-term contribution to scholarship in marketing for her work around consumer response to advertisements.

Linda is an active member of the Association for Consumer Research. In addition to having chaired the main ACR conference (ACR Montreal 1998), she has chaired the ACR Gender Conference and will chair the Consumer Culture Theory Conference in Oxford in August 2012.

Teaching

Linda’s MBA teaching focuses on the role of culture in the management of global markets for consumer goods, as well as branding and communication. In those classes, she uses an eclectic mix of examples, illustrated with images and music, and brings in industry experts to share their experiences. In addition to her courses for the MBA programme, Linda taught on the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Women Entrepreneurship Certificate Programme. This programme, launched in Hangzhou, Eastern China in 2009, provided 100 underserved high-potential female entrepreneurs with business and management education at Zhejiang University. Linda has developed two teaching cases for the programme.

Linda teaches:

Culture and Global Markets (MBA)

Branding and Communications (MBA)

Islamic Branding (Executive Education)

The Women’s Economy (Doctoral level)

Interpretation of Markets (Doctoral level)

Students

Anna Custers

Thesis title: Essays on indebtedness of low-income households - the role of attitudes, emotions and affect in household finance

Kelly Northridge

Mary Johnstone-Louis

Dr Mary Johnstone-Louis examines means through which business interacts with social impact and development outcomes. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School managing the School's work on Inclusive Capitalism and Purposeful Ownership.